The release added: “Prime Minister Shri Narendra Modi made these important announcements during a televised address to the nation on the evening of Tuesday 8th November 2016. He said that these decisions will fully protect the interests of honest and hard-working citizens of India and that those five hundred and one thousand rupee notes hoarded by anti-national and anti-social elements will become worthless pieces of paper.”

This public inconvenience was necessary, said the government, to have the time to restock bank branches and ATMs with new currency notes and to prepare the bank branches for the exchange services they would have to begin on 10 November.

The government explained that:

1. A law was passed in 2015 on disclosure of foreign bank accounts. In August 2016 strict rules were put in place to curtail benami transactions. During the same period a scheme to declare black money was introduced. These efforts have over the past two and a half years, brought more than Rs. 1.25 lakh crore of black money into the open.

2. These efforts have led to India emerging as “a bright spot in the global economy”, a preferred destination for investment and an easier place to do business in. “Leading financial agencies have shared their optimism about India’s growth as well.”

3. Indian enterprise and innovation has received a fillip due to the ‘Make in India’, ‘Start up India’ and ‘Stand up India’ programmes for enterprise, innovation and research in India.

There is no doubt that India’s economy has been plagued by the creation of wealth in some quarters that is obscenely disproportionate to the stated sources of individual and family income (see the press release from the Department of Economic Affairs, pdf). This has for long signalled corruption, and the means by which the corrupt (both giver and taker) become so is cash (but not only). The demonetisation has affected the political class and bureaucracy which accounted for the bulk of the corrupt money. The other difficulty the government and enforcement agencies have grappled with especially over the last decade is counterfeit currency notes, which have been used to maintain anti-national, secessionist and terrorist networks.

Old high denomination bank notes are seen kept in buckets at a counter as people stand in a queue to deposit their money inside a bank in the northern city of Kanpur, India, November 10, 2016. REUTERS/Adnan Abidi

I have several concerns about the demonetisation of the 500 and 1,000 currency notes, and the accompanying directions that the banking and financial services sector in India is now pushing the public.

Question 1 – Estimates are that currency in public circulationin 2006 was around Rs 4 lakh crore. In 2016 it was about Rs 16 lakh crore. If this estimate is of what RBI printed, why did it for ten years print physical currency at a rate higher than top annual GDP growth estimates?

Question 2 – As the 500 and 1000 notes are ‘high value’and so used for hoarding ‘black’ cash, why is the higher of the two (1000) being replaced by a note twice its value, that is, Rs 2000?

Since yesterday, there have been explanations offered about the effect of demonetisation on consumption and on slowing down an economy whose GDP growth is rated as the best amongst the large economies. “Consumer spending will likely fall in the immediate weeks as households adjust to the new system. India’s economy grew 7.1 percent during April to June, the slowest in 15 months, but the government and experts have been pointing out that a pick-up was likely in the next few months riding on good rains, a pay bonanza for government employees and festive-season buying.”

According to the national income data for the first quarter (April-June) of 2016-17, private final consumption expenditure (PFCE) – which measures household spending – at current prices is estimated at Rs 21.19 lakh crore, or about 55% of the gross domestic product (GDP). These are the numbers that a new class of ‘growth’ advocates in India are betting on. There is a connection to inflation – in the price of services, cost of manufactured articles and the prices of food – which however has not been answered as yet. Raising the denomination of the highest value currency note from Rs 1,000 to Rs 2,000 is in my view such a signal.

A person stands with his documents in a queue outside a branch of the State Bank of india as people wait to exchange old high denomination bank notes in Old Delhi, India, November 10, 2016. REUTERS/Cathal McNaughton

Question 3 – Is the net monetary gain by Government of India– more physical money from the ‘black economy’ brought onto the national accounts books – a way to ensure that India will next financial year also record the ‘fastest GDP growth’ (without the manufacturing, service and agriculture sectors doing so)?

Another partial answer comes from the Ministry of Finance, which said that “weak global demand” is among the “strongest challenges” in the near term for Indian economy. “Weak global demand is one among the strongest challenges in the near term. Exports and imports together constitute 42 per cent of the GDP (gross domestic product), even at the reduced levels in 2015-16.” The ministry said that reviving the savings and investment cycle in economy is challenging. The savings rate that stood at 34.6% in 2011-12, declined to 33% in 2014-15. Investment rate declined from 39% of GDP in 2011-12 to 34.2% in 2014-15. So these are the conventional macro-economic arguments, but the demonetisation will as I see it push any revival in savings and investment in quite a different direction from what the rural and agricultural base of the population require.

That direction is the ‘cashless’ one, with cash being blamed for fuelling the black economy. This is a danger-filled direction, one which we have already had a troubled history to look back at recently – the micro-credit bubble of the 2000-10 decade – to serve as a guide of what not to do. The banking and financial services industry has been expanding over the last two years, in tandem with the mobile telecom industry, with mobile payments and ‘wallets’.

Such a direction only widens the already troublesome gap between an acceptable physical basis for a value that the rupee represents (we have no gold standard, or any other acceptable equivalent) and the assigning of a notional value to a digital rupee whose issue, transfer and control will be entirely electronic. When viewed against the increasing “liberalisation” (or increasing “reforms”) of the banking, insurance, non-banking finance, financial services, small credit industries that has taken place in the last two years, and especially the opening up of these new services to foreign direct investment (FDI), the picture of the cashless economy so strenuously advocated by Finance Minister Arun Jaitley.